The case of hypochondria | The New Republic

As early as the second century, hypochondria was a disease characterized by a combination of physical symptoms and a psychological tendency toward depression and anxiety. That hypochondria, hysteria, and nervous disorders have all been terms for essentially the same thing at different points in history tells us something about our feelings toward the mysteries of the body—and that the most obscure mysteries (those of the abdomen, womb, and mind, respectively) tend to be perceived as the most threatening.

A body made of glass describes in detail how hypochondria became a vessel containing the fears and anxieties of various milieus. Hypochondria can take a variety of forms, from the 14th-century French king Charles VI, who believed he was made entirely of glass, to John Donne, whose poems addressed the possibility of illness “destroying everything,” to Molière, who probably suffered from undiagnosed tuberculosis and who, in his comedies, often ridiculed the doctors who could not cure him. Immanuel Kant, a self-proclaimed hypochondriac, embodied the Enlightenment's total surrender to reason in his belief that illness was a symptom of the mind's inability to control the body; his response was to commit himself to a rigorous regime of exercise, work, and diet designed to undermine the weakness of the body with the superiority of the mind. Charles Darwin, who suffered throughout his life from physical ailments that doctors could never explain (it was probably lactose intolerance), developed similarly strict habits to ward off his “crippling fear of the unknown,” Crampton writes. Marcel Proust suffered from allergies and asthma so severe that he took elaborate measures to protect himself from irritants: he did not have heaters in his rooms (attacks were triggered by smoke from fires) and ate little (he feared the effects of cooking smells). His father, an epidemiologist, believed his asthma was a form of hysteria or a nervous disorder. (Given the link between hypochondria and hysteria, I was glad that Crampton chose so many men as her historical examples; on the other hand, these were the people most likely to leave written records of their suffering.) In all cases, the personality changed in response to the symptoms and the anxiety they evoked: Proust's “life gradually became confined to his own four walls and then to his bed”; in Darwin's case, “a routine designed to prevent life-threatening attacks becomes the fabric of life itself.”

Crampton mines these stories to identify what she calls “followers,” but in each of these examples, how was the term hypochondria helpful to those affected? Some thought about their illness because it had actually destroyed their lives (Donne lost his father, three sisters, a brother, a stepfather, four children, and his wife early on) and by expressing their fear of the illness they were expressing a crucial part of their lives, while others, like Molière, who called in medical professionals to no avail, dramatized the experience to offset their anxiety with lightness. Others, like Kant, used the term to regain a sense of control over the body. Later, Freud's preoccupation with the subconscious established the idea that health problems were either physical or mental in nature, but that one could actually influence the other. Hypochondria in these cases is not pure pathology but serves a purpose: it expresses our basic mortality, or a theory of mind or body.